Presentation to the Yale Law School / Floyd Abrams Institute conference “Commercial Speech and the First Amendment 2020”
2 June 2020
Introduction
In keeping with the subject of today’s conference, I will focus on the regulation of online advertising, talking briefly about the existing situation and then focusing on what’s coming next. I will occasionally zoom out to look at EU regulation of online platforms more broadly.
What a time it is to be talking about platform regulation! We have no Donald Trump in Europe, but we do have lots of other presidents. The techlash over here is almost as heated, and the basic issues around platform responsibility are similar: should tech companies be doing more, i.e. taking greater responsibility for keeping their platforms safe and lawful, and for dealing with the negative externalities of their success? Should they be doing less, e.g. to interfere with their users’ speech and/or personal data? Commercial speech and political advertising are a core part of the debate. As in the US, the European debate is throwing up a broad range of concerns and demands, which are diffuse and often contradictory, but which are also so heated and repeated that some kind of additional regulation is all but inevitable. A major new EU legislative initiative launched just this morning, which I will get to. Continue reading “EU Influence on U.S. Internet Law, Policy and Practice in the field of digital advertising”